real_tabasco_sauce

I respectfully disagree with both of these. I didn't like the 45 minute average games, and there is absolutely logistics and reinforcements in a26. Good analogy. On the other side of that coin, how about we make the game take actual days to play, make the romans better than every other civ, make women actually give birth to get soldiers, individually put soldiers on horses, make the maps earth sized? Sound fun?

yes, this will be the primary issue to fix. I'm pretty much ready to submit a few merge requests when the community mod is set up for a27, one of which would address this. It should help with the "meat shield" meta people talk about.

@wowgetoffyourcellphone I think i've mentioned it before, but I plan on changing the ranged vs melee balance in the community mod. I think this way the fear of impacting the balance can be alleviated. Probably first will be the melee damage/armor change, then ranged damage reduction afterwards if needed.

I'd say the real reason is because those "tactics" don't help in 0ad because 0ad is a videogame, not a simulation of history. In game currently, you actually have many chances to control your units, as your mouse can make hundreds of clicks within the minute you say the battles are lasting. I recommend using the "option" key to order one unit at a time for sniping. If you want more tactics you can actually click and drag a group of units to adopt a shape: for example, order your cavalry archers to adopt a semicircle in front of the enemy. There are a lot of "tactics", of course they are videogame tactics, not real historical ones, but they work well and there is time to do them. I think you just are not aware of them.

you have discovered "overkill". like @alre says, there is nothing bad about it. If you do increase fire rate and decrease damage, then you have many more range queries in one second, and there will still be overkill when a larger group of units shoot one unit. I consider it a property of RTS games in general. The default behavior of your units may not be the most effective approach, depending on the situation. Thus, it is up to the player's skill to control units so that they fight more effectively. @JC (naval supremacist) was probably taking about sniping, which is the technique used to 1) minimize overkill and 2) kill ranged units past some melee "meat shield" I really like the fast-paced gameplay 0ad offers and I think slowing down fights would push us toward a24 gameplay, which longtime players will tell you was terrible for competitive play.

Good luck with that I've made much more reasonable propositions only for them to be outvoted.

Currently, acceleration and other changes to unit motion in a26 have all but eliminated dancing. You can still do it, more often done with a single unit like you mentioned, but its really not problematic. To make projectile velocity infinite would introduce many more problems to fix a non-issue. Fyi, I have a collection of upgrades designed to work on individual unit classes which are researched from the barracks and stable: https://gitlab.com/real_tabasco_sauce/0-a-d-community-mod-unit-specific-upgrades/-/compare/main...unit_upgrades?from_project_id=36954588&straight=false I have done plenty of adjustments recently for them and I think they work quite well. Among these upgrades, 4 affect unit speed and acceleration (infantry swordsmen, spearmen, as well as cavalry spearmen and cavalry axemen). The upgrades are available in town (tier 1) and city (tier 2).

Idk about "disaster" but it can be annoying. But, how to address it? I think for random (or procedural) maps a good solution would be to introduce variation in the position of metal and stone. This massively lowers the odds that the situation mentioned occurs, and also puts more "random" into the random map.

yes it had several forms. Another one was formation dancing, where switching a group of units in a formation made them very difficult to hit. Overall, it made battles very difficult to predict. new players would get absolutely ruined if they hadn't figured out dancing yet. And yes, homing arrows (as in aoe4) would be a really bad solution to dancing. Right, the real issue here is the lag, which will hopefully be less severe in a27 thanks to @vladislavbelov @Stan` @phosit and others. Acceleration values can always be tweaked as necessary.

@Helicity, your opinion is strong for someone that didn't play in previous alphas. I am pretty sure they are still available for download. The reasons for acceleration are: Visually appealing unit motion Vastly reduced the issues of dancing in competitive play Options for differentiating unit motion (spear cavalry faster compared to sword)

There appears to be tradeoffs for acceleration. With no acceleration, you get dancing and less visually appealing movements, and less options for balancing/diversifying movement mechanics. With acceleration, you lose agility. I think the main value of acceleration is the additional mechanic it provides, (ie give spearcavalry +50% acceleration compared to other cavalry for improved chasing). It allows for more interesting diversification of units. With respect to acceleration making lag worse, I would disagree. What you experience in late-game 4v4s is almost entirely lag between turns with very little contribution from acceleration. Players have certainly complained about unit responsiveness in previous alphas before acceleration, and that was also because of lag. If you set up a 1v1, I bet you will find the units much more responsive and enjoyable to use. That being said, I would be fine with some reductions to the acceleration values and/or turn rates.

Ok, but what makes https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4952 bad? There are already 2 very niche heroes for Maurya, one of which has an eco/military combination as @wowgetoffyourcellphone discusses. The other is a purely economic hero. It makes perfect sense to have a more militaristic hero in the form of chandragupta.

You are not executing the command in the right directory. The reason it says no such file is because 0AD is not in your home directory. If its anything like my mac, it should be in Applications. Try something like: xattr -cr /Applications/0\ A.D..app

Yeah, just changing the name would allow for that mod to be played, but other discrepancies will cause Out of sync errors, which is when your version of the game differs from others'. These discrepancies can be minor, like different values for crush by elephants, but in your case it is probably a big difference, like different locations for files and/or folders. I would suggest just deleting the mod and reinstalling it with the in-game mod downloader.

Truly a dream for @Isam f

Honestly, I'd say it's not very conventional. Its one of 2 attack rate auras. Also its the only global buff for eles. Also, I am not aware of any "soldier" auras that affect both armor and damage. The bonus affects a archer/spear + elephant composition like no other hero does and this is a signature comp for maury. I think the Mauryans need a more conventional hero for more general purpose fighting. The two existing ones are quite niche. Sorry if I don't really follow the logic here. I think having a eco focused hero and a military focused hero would be better, because the user tailors their strategy towards what the heroes enable. In other words, choosing a hero is a strategic choice. If the heroes all have low-impact eco and military bonuses (compared to higher-impact combined military or combined eco bonuses), I think we lose a lot of strategy. Now, I have done combined eco/military heroes and I think they are good, but to make 1 military, 1 eco bonus a standard for all heroes doesn't sound fun. I'd say some "conventional" heroes to change would be the roman heroes.

Ok, there was some disagreement with naming Chandragupta's first aura "Great Standing Army." What do people think of the new name "Empire Builder" (Thanks to @wowgetoffyourcellphone) https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4952 And also, any last comments on the bonus itself? aura 1: +10% damage, +1 armor for non-elephant soldiers, 60m aura 2: +15% attack rate, +10% speed for elephant units, global

Yes, I forgot about that part. I think its fine.

I am a little bit concerned about this feature. If a corral can both garrison livestock and train livestock, then one could use autoqueue to establish an exponentially growing amount of unraidable, 0 pop food economy. This wouldn't be great in the early game (I think) but later in the game, making more and more corrals and autoqueing to fill each one from one another could result in a disastrous gameplay consequences. Players could make dozens of corrals just to garrison each one. Then, there is much more pop space for more champion cavalry AND it is economy that can't be raided, at least like women can be raided. I think if the trickle is low enough to avoid this, then it will be weak/unused and if it is higher, then it will probably be used as above which I don't think is the intended use case of this feature.

If you are more familiar with AOE gameplay, "cycling" through CCs is common, but in 0ad, gameplay is much less CC oriented because economy largely comes from the barracks. In a typical more competitive game, players will end up with 1 or 2 CCs. With additional CCs used for resource acquisition or offensive positions. I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to cycle through the CCs, but that it might not be as helpful as it is in AOE2.

Looks like the idea came full circle Anyone have thoughts on this aura? 1- global 15% attack rate for elephants, 10% movement speed 2- 60m radius: Non-elephant soldiers +10% damage, +1 armor of all types For bonus 2, I could make it only infantry or non-elephant, as it could be too OP with ele archers. -> Done, I made it apply to non-elephant soldiers. https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4952

@zxphxr I think the issue may be that the mod is not installed correctly. The mod appears to be housed in the "user" folder where it should be in a folder called "community-mod" within "mods". I am pretty sure one of the checks for mod compatibility is that the folder names are the same. to access the mods folder: Go-> Go to folder -> Library/Application Support/0ad/mods Here is where you should see a folder called community-mod alongside other mods like BoonGUI. Did you get the community mod from mod.io? You could redownload the community mod from the mod downloader, perhaps after deleting any community mod related files from the folder "user". If you see "community-mod" within user, then all you have to do is move it out of user and back one directory into "mods".

Yes you are right, the concept is the main thing. What I was mentioning earlier was not to make the resource icon smaller, but to just stratify the two, so that they are less overlapping. With the resource dead center, it is a little bit visually confusing.

It also improves performance for some users. Some have a much better experience, while others don't see much of a difference. Probably depends on your computer. For me it was smoother movements and about 15 more fps. This is @leopard's video on the differences in performance: I should mention that "A26" in the video was actually the development version of a27 which included the spidermonkey update which was also a performance enhancement.

Ah I see, well there will likely be at least 3 to 4 weeks before the first is released, just for enough branches to accumulate. Also it might take a bit to get it set up.